Ahed al-Tamimi turned 17 on January 31st. The night before, in an act of solidarity, the Youth Against Settlements (YAS) organization threw a birthday party for Ahed and Palestinian children of Hebron also born in the month of January.

The event was held in Gheith, a Palestinian neighborhood, though illegally occupied by Israeli settlers, in the old city of Hebron. Equal parts birthday celebration and political demonstration, nearly 200 children and international activists attended the function.

Gheith was once an open cluster of homes and shops with a small square in the middle leading to al-Shuhada street. Once a bustling market street in the heart of the city, Shuhada street was shut down in 1994 after violent clashes between Palestinians and illegal settlers. The street was closed in order to buffer the city’s inhabitants from the settlers, now roughly 700 in a city of over 200,000.

“Today the soldiers declared the area a closed military zone and they closed the gate (to the fenced off neighborhood)—a violation of their rights…their childhood. The kids, they don’t have any rights, they suffer from settlers and soldiers violence. Ahed [al-Tamimi] is in a little cage, but these children, they are [also in a cage]. A slightly bigger cage,” Amro said.

Amro believes Israeli child detention oppresses Palestinian children’s childhood and “destroys them from an early age.” “They don’t respect their childhood, they don’t let them study, they don’t let them visit their families,” Amro said.

Co-founder of Code Pink, Medea Benjamin was in attendance at the birthday celebrations. Code Pink was among the groups banned from entry into Israel in early January due to their support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Benjamin and her co-worker, Tighe Barry, arrived at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv expecting to be rejected at customs but instead were granted entrance without trouble.

After the unexpected access, they contacted YAS and "heard that there was a birthday party for Ahed. “We thought, what a perfect time to combine two things we really care about, the imprisonment of children and the difficulty of living surrounded by settlers,” Benjamin told Palestine Monitor.

A long time peace activist, telling stories from Washington D.C. to Gaza, Benjamin said, “The birthday party was a brilliant example of how you can protest the system in a creative, festive, non-violent way, that accomplishes several things at the same time: highlighting the imprisonment of a young woman who has become an icon in the region, giving the children in the neighborhood a time to celebrate their lives and bringing in outsiders to witness how the military is intimidated by even a birthday party for children.”

For YAS, and why they decided to hold the event, Amro said, “We came, to show them [the kids] solidarity, we came to give them support, and to show them that they are not alone.”